Can Your Phone Spark Delight?
I talk with Kevin Roose, NYT tech columnist, about how (and why) he made his phone more delightful
Kevin Roose = A Human Delight
Hello everyone!
Last weekend, I found out that New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose had devoted a full ten minutes of his podcast, Hard Fork, to talking about delights. More specifically, Kevin told his co-host Casey that he had read the op-ed about delight that I wrote for the New York Times, and had decided to put a tech columnist spin on the idea by making his phone itself more delightful.
I know Kevin because a couple of years ago, I served as his “phone breakup coach” for a fantastic article he wrote titled “Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain.” (In fact, you may have read that article—it ended up going totally viral.) In a fun twist, it led to me and Kevin being invited to be on The Today Show together.
2019 feels like a very, very long time ago.
We’ve kept in occasional touch over the years, and I always have a lot of fun talking with him, so I decided to reach out to Kevin to see if he’d be up for chatting with me for this newsletter about his new, delightful phone—I was curious both about the technical details of what he did, and why he felt the need to make his phone more delightful in the first place. Here’s my summary and a clip from our conversation. (As a Fun Squad/paid subscriber bonus, I’ve included the full audio and video at the end.)
Delight as Playfulness
It occurs to me that some of you might be wondering why I’m focusing so much on delight when we’re in the middle of a FUN-tervention.
Here’s why: noticing and sharing delight can help us adopt a more playful attitude toward life. And as you probably recall, playfulness is one of the three ingredients in fun (the other two are connection and flow).
Playfulness is often the ingredient that adults struggle with the most, because we assume that it means being childish or immature. In reality, though, playfulness is just about having a lighthearted attitude, which is exactly what delight practices help us to do. Delight begets playfulness, and playfulness begets fun.
What to do today:
Before I get into what Kevin did and why he did it, here’s what I’d like you to do today:
Put your fun magnets and fun factors into action
In my last post, I talked about how to figure out your fun magnets and your fun factors. Now it’s time to put some of your reflections into action. This weekend, I’d like you to carve out time for a fun magnet and, ideally, say yes to a new activity that involves one or more of your fun factors. You can share your intentions and your experiences in this thread.Continue to notice—and create—moments of playfulness, connection, and flow
As I explained in this post, these are the three ingredients for fun and the more you experience and appreciate them (in any combination), the more joyful and fulfilling your life will feel.Keep contributing to the group delight chat or your own private delight chats — or, hey, if you’d prefer, follow Kevin’s suggestion and make your phone itself more delightful by creating a “delight” photo album, and making a home screen widget to display it. (Here are the instructions again for how to create a photo widget for your home screen.)
Fun Squad/Paid Subscribers: ask me any questions you have about fun or screen/life balance (and share your experiences) in our Fun Forum. I’ll respond personally to each one. Join us!
Now, back to Kevin.
Why Kevin Made His Phone Delightful
Kevin wanted to make his phone more delightful because he had realized that in its current state, his phone was basically a delivery device for horror and stress. Every time he checked it, he’d be presented with a terrible news story, or an anxiety-provoking email or text. And since, as a tech columnist, he checks his phone a lot, this meant that he was exposing himself to negativity multiple times an hour.
I write about this issue in How to Break Up With Your Phone using the analogy of a Pandora’s Box: every time you open your phone, you’re going to encounter a new emotional trigger, and once that emotion has gotten into your brain, you’re not going to be able to stuff it back into the phone. Unfortunately, most of these triggers are negative.
That’s why I recommend getting in the habit of asking yourself, before you check your phone, what your current emotional state is and how it’s likely to change if you look at your phone. For me personally, this is often an effective deterrent: I realize that I’m likely to feel worse after checking, and so I don’t check.
I also have taken steps to make my phone as emotionally neutral as possible. For example, I don’t have photos on my lock or home screens, because I don’t want to conflate looking at my phone (and seeing, say, a photo of my family) with actually spending time with those people in real life. In an attempt to reduce impulsive app checks, I also took all the apps off my home screen (I open apps by searching for them individually in the search bar, instead of tapping on their icon). My phone is basically a boring field of grey.
What Kevin Did
Kevin has done a version of this—for example, he has created a folder for himself of “red flag” apps that he knows are likely to be time-sucking, and has designed his home screen to primarily offer him apps that are either practical or that support a habit he’s trying to cultivate. (I think of this as turning your phone from a temptation to a tool.) But he’s taken my advice an intriguing step further: instead of designing his phone to have a neutral effect on his mood, he has designed it to spark delight.
Here’s how he explained his logic: if he had a room in his house that consistently made him sad, angry, stressed and depressed (let’s call it a Chamber of Horrors), he could decide to shut the door and never go into that room again—or he could redesign the room. (We decided to call this a “Den of Delight”—trademark pending.) When it comes to his phone, he’s decided to experiment with the latter.